Book Image

The Reinforcement Learning Workshop

By : Alessandro Palmas, Emanuele Ghelfi, Dr. Alexandra Galina Petre, Mayur Kulkarni, Anand N.S., Quan Nguyen, Aritra Sen, Anthony So, Saikat Basak
Book Image

The Reinforcement Learning Workshop

By: Alessandro Palmas, Emanuele Ghelfi, Dr. Alexandra Galina Petre, Mayur Kulkarni, Anand N.S., Quan Nguyen, Aritra Sen, Anthony So, Saikat Basak

Overview of this book

Various intelligent applications such as video games, inventory management software, warehouse robots, and translation tools use reinforcement learning (RL) to make decisions and perform actions that maximize the probability of the desired outcome. This book will help you to get to grips with the techniques and the algorithms for implementing RL in your machine learning models. Starting with an introduction to RL, youÔÇÖll be guided through different RL environments and frameworks. YouÔÇÖll learn how to implement your own custom environments and use OpenAI baselines to run RL algorithms. Once youÔÇÖve explored classic RL techniques such as Dynamic Programming, Monte Carlo, and TD Learning, youÔÇÖll understand when to apply the different deep learning methods in RL and advance to deep Q-learning. The book will even help you understand the different stages of machine-based problem-solving by using DARQN on a popular video game Breakout. Finally, youÔÇÖll find out when to use a policy-based method to tackle an RL problem. By the end of The Reinforcement Learning Workshop, youÔÇÖll be equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to solve challenging problems using reinforcement learning.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Preface
Free Chapter
2
2. Markov Decision Processes and Bellman Equations

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we learned about the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem – a popular sequential decision-making problem that aims to maximize your reward when playing on the slot machines in a casino. In this chapter, we will combine deep learning techniques with a popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) technique called Q learning. Put simply, Q learning is an RL algorithm that decides the best action to be taken by an agent for maximum rewards. The "Q" in Q learning represents the quality of the action that is used to gain future rewards. In many RL environments, we may not have state transition dynamics (that is, the probability of going from one state to another), or it is too complex to gather state transition dynamics. In these complex RL environments, we can use the Q learning approach to implement RL.

In this chapter, we will start by understanding the very basics of deep learning, such as what a perceptron and a gradient descent are and what...